PAUL'S "MISQUOTE"

As I was doing some research for my sermon today, I came across a quote from an author I had never heard of: Dennis McKinsey.

Apparently McKinsey has made a career out of criticizing the Bible. Over the last several decades he has maintained some sort of journal on "Biblical Errancy" and produced an "encyclopedia" filled with all the mistakes he has located in the Scriptures. 

But the snippet I read from McKinsey was rather unimpressive for a self-professed "scholar" of the Bible. It was in regard to Paul making his farewell speech to the Ephesians in Acts 20 which concludes with this line in v.35: "In everything, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus Himself: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

Everyone knows Jesus said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive", but I have to admit that I had never realized this sentence never shows up in any of the Gospels. It's found only here in Acts, quoted secondhand by Paul.

This is the sort of "mistake" that catches McKinsey's eye and engages his sharp skills of textual criticism:

"One of the great misquotes of Paul is found in Acts 20:35 where he says: “…ye ought to support the weak and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Nowhere in the New Testament did Jesus make such a statement. Paul’s oratory apparently got away from him."

Did you catch that? It's a "misquote" because the sentence isn't found anywhere in the Gospels! 

It's a safe guess that McKinsey operates with the presupposition that the supernatural does not exist, so one can't blame him for ignoring the fact that Paul claims to have met Jesus on the road to Damascus and then later to have been "taught by Jesus". It seems Paul might have been able to claim he heard things from Jesus that nobody else heard - which makes sense if one believes in the supernatural.

But even if McKinsey refuses to buy into the possibility of the supernatural, surely he does not assume that every single word of Jesus' teachings were recorded in the Gospels? Or that none of Jesus' teachings that didn't get written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John could have possibly been preserved and spread by other people? 

In fact, many actual biblical scholars don't believe that Paul necessarily had access to ANY of the Gospels during the lifetime of his ministry. The early church grew in an oral culture and the only Scripture it held collectively was the Old Testament.

Now THAT is something to ponder.